Performance Art e Action Poetry – beyond work of Art plural. Nicola Frangione

Performance Art e Action Poetry – beyond work of Art plural
Nicola Frangione

Performance Art and Action Poetry rightly belong to the most significant events within the panorama of international art research, encouraging cultural exchanges and placing emphasis on the concept of nomadism as a key ingredient in the artist’s work, moving from a linguistic territory to another and offering an opportunity to think about the meaning as well as the design techniques of the plural work.

“If we were not totally different in time, we could again,
yet as we would not be new in time, we could be totally different”


New Poetic Action is supposed to go through interdisciplinary figures and cross over into the tension of total time. The performer/poet releases immense energy; he or she functions as an overwhelming jumble, a flowing river, a relentless interlocutor who can enthusiastically open windows onto new and old worlds.

Poetic performativity holds a variety of synergies. The body becomes expressive matter. In performance art the nontheatrical body as a whole bursts into a new type of dramaturgy, where, from time to time, the space-time barycentre leads it to a different field: moving visual art, environmental installation, living body poetry.

Nowadays Performance Art, as Action Poetry, cannot be defined through one moment of analysis, because aesthetic judgment involves many disciplines; nevertheless, the body, including its language and expression, plays a key role.

Sometimes centrality is close to dance or rituality – for example, provocatively –; some other times it involves sonority, which often includes the text. However, the expressive body steadily heads in two directions: a cold one, conceptually, and a hot one, existentially.

These are the hallmarks of artistic expressiveness, which has become quite popular internationally. Yet, performance art seems to be expressing its poetic energy through nomadic characters, physically, by joining an international circuit, which means moving from a geographical area to another, meeting different cultural contexts, as well as linguistically, by relying on interdisciplinary instruments and modes.

They now tend to assess the message of performance aesthetically, while estimating its poetic energy existentially.

The performer has a mission to fulfil in bringing the energy that comes from the outside into performance. In a way, performance art means a desire to revive something that is outside space-time in action; it means fusing internal and external energy, allowing different elements to harmonize with each other.

“Any work rich with elements is never univocal, although it blends together,
in ‘becoming’ art we borrow time as a legacy,
it is never really closed; it is on hold”

This is the key ingredient of performance, where the artist takes action to catch and shape messages, revising and reviving them, so that each art message eventually loses possession of its maker.

The first stage of each art production should be adjusted to external energy, and poetics is mainly influenced by the wait for the next performance moment.

At the end of any performance, after the dynamic stage of the body, poetic action causes the attraction, overlapping and absorption process to be discontinued; as a result, energy hangs in, thus epitomizing the potential political role of art.

Nicola Frangione
Monza – October 2006